APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 43 



in other words, that he does not love God, the 

 attempt to argue him into acquiring that pleasure 

 would be as hopeless as the endeavour to persuade 

 Peter Bell of the " witchery of the soft blue sky." 



In whichever way we look at the matter, morality 

 is based on feeling, not on reason ; though reason 

 alone is competent to trace out the effects of our 

 actions and thereby dictate conduct. Justice is 

 founded on the love of one's neighbour ; and good- 

 ness is a kind of beauty. The moral law, like the 

 laws of physical nature, rests in the long run upon 

 instinctive intuitions, and is neither more nor less 

 "innate" and "necessary" than they are. Some 

 people cannot by any means be got to understand 

 the first book of Euclid ; but the truths of mathe- 

 matics are no less necessary and binding on the 

 great mass of mankind. Some there are who 

 cannot feel the difference between the " Sonata 

 Appassionata " and "Cherry Ripe"; or between a 

 grave-stone-cutter's cherub and the Apollo Belvidere ; 

 but the canons of art are none the less acknowledged. 

 While some there may be, who, devoid of sympathy, 

 are incapable of a sense of duty ; but neither does 

 their existence affect the foundations of morality. 

 Such pathological deviations from true manhood are 

 merely the halt, the lame, and the blind of the world 

 of consciousness ; and the anatomist of the mind 

 leaves them aside, as the anatomist of the body 

 would ignore abnormal specimens. 



And as there are Pascals and Mozarts, Newtons 

 and Raffaelles, in whom the innate faculty for science 

 or art seems to need but a touch to spring into full 

 vigour, and through whom the human race obtains 

 new possibilities of knowledge and new conceptions 

 of beauty : so there have been men of moral genius, 

 to whom we owe ideals of duty and visions of moral 



